THE DARKNESS

‘They Used Dark Forces’ was published in 1964, and is about magicians in the last days of WW2 battling for the supremacy of the countries that they represent. That sounds terribly exciting, but, like all Dennis Wheatley books, it is too leaden and drawn out to completely fulfil its promise, let alone make good on its fantastic cover art. 

In an extension of a stage hypnotist making a man eat an onion as if t’were an apple, the English Magus influences nasty, nutty old Hitler to shoot himself so that, of all things, he can be reincarnated as the leader of a Martian master race and then travel across space to have another (successful, this time) go at Earth. The always gullible Fuhrer falls for this obvious crock of crap and blows his mad brains out, cue end of war in Europe*. No less than he deserved, he was a bloody idiot. 

There's a picture of Dennis on the back of the book. He is no doubt trying to look like the epitome of the epicurean in his fancy smoking jacket, but instead resembles a bad waxwork. 

  

One of the things we've always liked best about black magicians is that they have no code of conduct. You won’t get one whining about how it would be ‘unethical’ to kill a man using magic, they just kill the bloke. We suppose that being a black magician is a bit like joining the Readers Digest, you realise you are letting yourself into, and know that you are committed to it until death, perhaps beyond. The Law of Man and God has very little to do with it. 

Wheatley’s magician, Gregory Sallust, features in several of his books. A little known fact is that the character was based on a real life wartime figure, William Wallace, a mystic and wizard who advised Churchill on a number of occasions. After the war, Wallace became better known as popular magician Ali Bongo.

^{*Yes, we thought The Unknown Soldier was behind this, too.}

KA-BOOM!

We believe that long suppressed apocalyptic neurosis is the reason the US government are still so aggressively paranoid about everything, i.e. having unleashed the atomic genie seventy years ago, they are still psychologically scarred by the idea that someone might turn it on them. We understand entirely, but they need to get over it - talk it over with a good psychiatrist, perhaps - maybe take up golf.

There's that obsession with strength again. These comics are over fifty years old, but the message is like a sound bite from today's news. No country wants to be weak, of course, but, just like a Friday night, if you go out expecting trouble, you usually get into a fight - and the consequences can be unpleasant.

They call this era of US comics THE GOLDEN AGE, by the way, but pretty much everything is overshadowed by war (the last one; the current one; the next one) and the horrors of science. Bit like TOMTIT loving the seventies and forgetting about immersion heaters, strikes and the IRA, of course.

... 

In 1967, country music renegade Johnny Paycheck recorded ‘The Cave’, a strange, time shifting paean to the end of the world. It’s one of a number of unsettling songs that Paycheck released on the Little Darlin’ label, including ‘(Pardon Me) I’ve Got Someone To Kill’, ‘(Like Me) You’ll Recover In Time’ (sung from the perspective of a jilted husband - in an asylum), ‘Don’t Monkey With Another Monkey’s Monkey’ and ‘If I’m Gonna Sink (I Might As Well As Go To The Bottom)’. 

For us, the best Country music is a perfect blend of the searingly honest and the completely contrived. Paycheck walked that line, his mannered delivery and sensational subject matter counter-balanced by his apparent sincerity and real life behaviour (drugs, drink, forgery, rape, shooting people), which established his credentials as a man permanently on the edge of a brawl or a breakdown. There was nothing fake about Johnny, except his name (his real name was Donald Lytle). He died in 2003, much older than his 64 years.

UNKNOWN, UNSUNG, UNHINGED

THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER is a favourite comic character of ours, especially in the way that his adventures encompass both war and horror, with a little bit of pseudoscience thrown in. We never learn The Unknown Soldiers name, we never see what he originally looks like, we are only ever party to the tattered, featureless physiognomy hard earned in war. 

His origin is fairly straightforward: while fighting in the Pacific with his brother, a grenade landed in their foxhole. His brother smothered the blast and was killed; the Unknown Soldier survived, but had his face torn from his head. Just before his death, his brother had talked about how ‘one guy, in the right place at the right time’ could alter the tide of war. After recovering, The Unknown Soldier volunteers to be that ‘one guy’, and the US Army accept his offer, sending him on perilous, vitally important missions where his survival is doubtful, but his potential impact enormous. 

With no face of his own anymore, The Unknown Soldier is a master of disguise, able to wear a variety of high-tech masks to aid his undercover work. His ravaged features, normally covered with bandages, bother him under the latex, so he is forever scratching a persistent itch, so, even wearing somebody else’s face, he is constantly reminded of the terrible state of his own, a constant physical discomfort to add to the mental stress of his high pressure do or die missions. 

But The Unknown Soldier prevails: he wins; he survives; he overcomes. He blows up the weird prototype weapons, he assassinates the enemy General, he saves the civilians, he rescues the hostages. He kills hundreds of people, perhaps thousands. There are no medals for The Unknown Soldier, however, no parades. He doesn’t exist, so how can there be? 

A thread of awful melancholy runs through the stories, especially as it's clear that The Unknown Soldier doesn’t care if he lives or dies, but, while he is around, he just wants to keep hitting the enemy as hard as he can. The stories sometimes fall foul of the American tendency to overplay their involvement in parts of the war (inventing invasions of Britain so that The Unknown Soldier can save us, for instance), but then these are American comics, for American audiences, so that can be forgiven. They are also fantasies, dark, strange fantasies of a clandestine war fought by seemingly indestructible men with no purpose other than to fight, to kill: what else can they do with faces like that? 

In the final issue of the original story arc, The Unknown Soldier discovers that the Nazis have developed a vampire octopus codenamed Nosferatu that they intend to unleash upon the allied forces approaching Berlin*. He impersonates Hitler to countermand the order, then meets the Fuhrer face to face. They fight, and our hero shoots Hitler in the head and kills him. The Unknown Soldier then arranges it to look like suicide, thereby ending the War in Europe. 

On the way home, he saves a little girl’s life by throwing himself on a grenade, just as his brother had done four years previously, and dies. Or does he? Well, no, as he crops up again and again in the DC Universe in years to come, although never explicitly so. 

The character has latterly been ‘reimagined’ as an immortal being, an eternal warrior, and, most recently, as a battle scarred Ugandan freedom fighter. The Unknown Soldier we knew and loved and felt sorry for is no longer that ‘one guy’, merely one aspect of a universal concept.

* This is only marginally weirder than some of the Nazi's actual last ditch schemes to stave off defeat.